Sometimes Windows gets stuck during upgrade – the spinny dots move, but no progress is made. If you force a reboot then Windows will roll the upgrade back, but in order to figure out why the problem is happening, it is very useful to grab a memory dump of the problem while the upgrade is…

When troubleshooting audio problems it is sometimes interesting to know exactly what audio API the app in question is using. Sometimes we can just ask the app developer, or look at their code. Sometimes it is possible to get an educated guess by looking at the list of .dlls that get loaded into the app….

An Intel audio driver was incorrectly pushed to devices via Windows Update for a short period of time earlier this week. After receiving reports from users that their audio no longer works, we immediately removed it and started investigating. If your audio broke recently, and you’re running Windows 10 version 1709 or above, please check to…

I’ve blogged a number of times about how to use the Feedback Hub to report problems and suggest features. But if you’re using Windows 7, you don’t have the Feedback Hub. What can you do? Here’s a couple of suggestions. Try a Windows 10 machine and see if the problem still exists (or if the…

Boring introductory stuff first: Windows Vista introduced a feature called the “Multimedia Class Scheduler Service” (MMCSS). This is designed to give audio and video threads regular, short, bursts of very high priority, so that audio and video can stream without glitching. The bursts are regular so that audio and video packets don’t get delayed, and…

The current President of the United States, Donald Trump, has tweeted several times about the stock market. February 16th, 2017 Stock market hits new high with longest winning streak in decades. Great level of confidence and optimism – even before tax plan rollout! July 3rd, 2017 Dow hit a new intraday all-time high! I wonder…

I have blogged before about the Microsoft class driver for USB Audio 2.0 hardware. If you are a hardware vendor, and you make USB Audio 2.0 hardware, you should expect your hardware to work with this driver. If it doesn’t, you may be interested in understanding why – maybe it’s a bug on our end,…

The Windows Audio Session API (WASAPI) provides a family of interfaces for playing or recording audio. Chief among these are the IAudioClient, IAudioClient2, and IAudioClient3 interfaces. There is a Windows audio session (WASAPI) sample on GitHub, but in this blog post I want to dive into the nitty-gritty of one particular question: How do I…

I came across this five-year old Reddit post on /r/finalfantasy titled “Scumbag Lulu” The problem is even a little broader than this. Lulu is not the only experienced guardian – Auron served as Braska’s guardian and got even farther, reaching Yunalesca. Auron’s starting HP is 1030, which is definitely more, but he is a fighter…